Beth Comstock Quotes

traditional business strategy too often does not bother to create a story or narrative about its actions for its employees and the world to gather around. For the strategy to become reality, people need to see themselves in the story and then take action to make the story happen.

Directed dabbling is what led me to Bre Pettis, a former art teacher from Seattle who started NYC Resistor, a Brooklyn maker space, and also launched the 3-D printing company MakerBot next door. I had been tracking Bre as part of our digital development effort. I e-mailed Bre to ask if I could simply hang out and watch what he was doing: “I want to understand the new wave of micro-manufacturing, and especially what you are doing with 3-D printing.” Resistor was a higgledy-piggledy series of rooms on the fourth floor of a run-down factory. There Bre introduced me to his “makers” as we walked between workbenches covered with bits of sheet metal and wires and boxes of odds and ends. I saw people making a miniature wind turbine and a portable water purification system. That is, GE kinds of things. One guy was building his own miniature gas turbine, because, well, he could. “Why not?” he said. “People want to live off the grid.” “We could use this ingenuity inside GE,” I said out loud. After NYC Resistor and MakerBot, I met with Shapeways, in Queens, an advanced contract manufacturer where people submitted designs to be 3-D printed for a fee. As we toured the space and talked about the jewelry they made, I

So we turned to GrabCAD, an online community of over a million engineers and designers, and laid down another challenge: whoever designed the bracket that cut the most weight while still safely supporting the engine would get a cash prize of $7,000.

One of those frameworks is known as emergence, a term that until recently has been used primarily to explain natural systems—what biologists call complex adaptive systems, systems that can adapt and evolve within a changing environment. Colonies of insects such as ants and bees, for example, use simple rules and networks to produce adaptive behavior.

Giving ourselves permission allows us to hack rules that don’t make sense rather than follow them; to take ideas and stories apart that aren’t working; to go around the gatekeepers, bullies, and bureaucratic bottlenecks that would stifle change. Developing a habit of self-permission will instill in you the belief that you are in control of your career and your life, regardless of what is going on around you.

Lydia Slaby shows that the power to change is within every one of us—once we give up the illusion of control. We don't control much of anything in life, but we do control how we react to change. You'll cry, you'll laugh, you'll cheer her on, but mostly you'll realize what it means to live a life fully in control of your true self. Lydia's story points the way.

A spark is a person, usually an outsider, whose unique perspective—the more different, the better—challenges the team to think differently.